Betsy and the Great World/Betsy's Wedding: Betsy-Tacy Series

Betsy and the Great World

and

Betsy’s Wedding

Maud Hart Lovelace

Illustrated by Vera Neville

Table of Contents

Foreword

Betsy and the Great World

Betsy’s Wedding

Maud Hart Lovelace and Her World

About Betsy and the Great World

About Betsy’s Wedding

Whatever Happened To…

About the Author

Other Books by in The Betsy-Tacy Books

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

When I was first asked to speak about Maud Hart Lovelace I had to reread all ten of my Betsy-Tacy books. I would like to make this sound like a hardship, but most of you know better. There are three authors whose body of work I have reread more than once over my adult life: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Maud Hart Lovelace. It was, as always, a pleasure and delight.

And the truth is that I have been preparing for this speech, in a variety of ways, for thirty years, and especially for the last ten. That was the decade in which I began to examine most closely what it meant to be a feminist in America, as I am, and why I felt so strongly that the women’s movement and what I believe it stands for has changed my life.

Many of those issues have been explored in my column in The New York Times, and over and over again I have tried to reinforce a simple message that I believe has been distorted, muddled, misunderstood, and just plain lied about in recent years by those who want women to go, not forward, but backward.

And that is that feminism is about choices. It is about women choosing for themselves which life roles they wish to pursue. It is about deciding who does and gets and merits and earns and succeeds in what by smarts, capabilities, and heart—not by gender. It is about honoring individuals because of their humanity, not their physiology.

And that is why my theme today is: Betsy Ray, Feminist Icon.

Could there be better books, and could there be a better girl, adolescent, young woman, to teach us all those things about choices than the Betsy-Tacy books and Betsy herself, along with her widely disparate circle of Tacy and Tib, Julia and Margaret, Mrs. Ray and Anna the hired girl, Mrs. Poppy and Miss Mix, Carney and Winona, Miss Bangeter and Miss Clarke? All these different women, who go so many different ways, with false starts and stops, with disappointments and limitations, and yet a sense that they can find a place for themselves in the world.

Do you realize that not once, in any book, does any individual, male or female, suggest to Betsy that she cannot, as she so hopes to do, become a writer? Can anyone possibly appreciate the impact that made on a child like me, wanting it too but seeing all around me on the bookshelves the names of men and seeing all around me in my house the domesticated ways of women?

In the early books, of course, this is not what we see. We see prototypes, really, as surely as Snow White and Rose Red, or Cinderella and her stepsisters. We see three little girls who begin as types: the shy and earnest one; the no-nonsense and literal one; and the ringleader, the storyteller, the adventurer, the center—Elizabeth Warrington Ray. Then the adventures and, more important, the traditions begin—the picnics on the Big Hill, the forays to little Syria, the shopping trips at Christmastime, and Betsy’s sheets of foolscap piling up in her Uncle Keith’s old trunk.

The books are simply stories of small town life and enduring friendship among little girls, and so it is easy to overlook their importance as teaching tools. But consider the alternatives to children in the early grades. The images of girls tend, overwhelmingly, to be of fairy princesses spinning straw into gold or sleeping until they are awakened by a prince.

Even the best ones usually show us caricatures instead of characters. Recently, for example, I wrote an introduction for a fiftieth anniversary edition of Madeline (Viking, 1989). It is one of my favorite picture books for children, has been since I myself was a child, mostly because of one line which sums up the rest of it: To the tiger in the zoo Madeline just said ‘Pooh, pooh.’

Madeline, unlike the straw-spinning princesses, has attitude. She is nobody’s fool.

But attitude, truth to tell, is a surface, two-dimensional characteristic, attractive as it may be. The stories of Betsy, Tacy, and Tib transcend attitude just as the simplistic drawings of the early books give way to the more realistic (albeit, to my mind, slightly oversweet) pictures. They are ultimately books about character, and especially about the character of one girl whose greatest sin, throughout the books, is to undervalue herself.

For those are the mistakes Betsy finds she cannot forgive, when she sells herself short, when she is not all she can be. As opposed to the shy, retiring, and respectful girl who became so valued in girl’s fiction, Betsy does best when she serves herself, when she is true to herself. In this she most resembles two other fictional heroines who, not surprisingly, also long to be writers and take their work very seriously indeed. One is Anne Shirley of the Anne of Green Gables books, and the other is Jo March of Little Women.

But the key difference, I think, is a critical one. Both Anne and Jo are implicitly made to pay in those books for the fact that they do not conform to feminine norms. Anne begins life as an orphan and never is permitted to forget that she must work for a living—in fact, you might call her the Joe Willard of girls, although she is far less prickly and far more easy to like than Joe Willard. Jo March of Little Women habitually reminds herself how unattractive she is and settles down, in one of the most unconvincing matches in fiction, with the older, most unromantic Professor Bhaer. It is her beautiful sister Amy who gets the real guy, the rich and romantic Laurie.

Betsy, by contrast, never had to pay for the sin of being herself; in fact, she only finds herself under a cloud when she is less than herself. At base, she is a charmed soul from beginning to end because she can laugh at herself and take herself seriously at the same time, because she is serious but never a prig, and interested in boys but never a flirt. Can anyone forget the moment when, returning from the sophomore dance at Schiller Hall with that absolute poop Phil Brandish trying to worm his fist into her pocket, she turns to him with desperation and blurts out, You might as well know. I don’t hold hands.

In fact it’s probably in that book, Betsy in Spite of Herself, that we see Betsy most the way I think we were always meant to see her, as a girl who will do what is right for her, not necessarily what the world wants her to do. But first, like most of us, she has to do what is wrong for her to find out what is right. She decides to nab Phil just for the fun of it, and to that end she adds the letter E to the end of her perfectly good name, sprays herself with Jockey Club perfume, and uses green stationery to write notes instead of her poetry or stories. It’s inevitable—when the real Betsy sneaks out, in the form of a song parody she and Tacy invented before the Phil/Betsy affair began, they break up. But instead of a sore heart, Betsy is left with Shakespeare: This above all: to thine own self be true.

Betsy already knows, as do we, that that self varies widely from girl to girl, that there is no little box that will fit them all. In Heaven to Betsy, she says, in the passage that made the future so clear and yet so mysterious for me:

She had been almost appalled, when she started going around with Carney and Bonnie, to discover how fixed and definite their ideas of marriage were. They both had cedar hope chests and took pleasure in embroidering their initials on towels to lay away. Each one had picked out a silver pattern and they were planning to give each other spoons in these patterns for Christmases and birthdays. When Betsy and Tacy and Tib talked about their future they planned to be writers, dancers, circus acrobats.

Betsy never looks down on those aspirations of Carney and Bonnie’s. But she never looks away from her own aspirations. She follows a sensible progression from writing, to dreaming of being a writer, to actually saying she is going to be one, to sending her stories (when she is a mere senior in high school) to various women’s magazines. She makes the mistake so many of us make—like Jo in Little Women, she learns early on that writing about debutantes in Park Avenue penthouses is doomed to failure if you’ve neither debuted nor visited Park Avenue—but her gumption carries her through.

And there are, interestingly, no naysayers among her family members. While the Rays have three daughters, early on two of them are already committed to having careers outside the home, Julia as an opera singer, Betsy as a writer. Betsy’s parents are totally committed to this idea for them both, sending Julia to the Twin Cities and even to Europe to further her training as a singer, and arguing vociferously that Betsy’s work is as good as any that appears in popular magazines.

The idea of something that is yours to do became narrower and narrower as my mother grew up. As Betty Friedan wrote in The Feminine Mystique (Dell, 1963), by the time my mother was ready to enter what Julia always called The Great World, it had narrowed to one role and one role alone, that of wife and mother.

I don’t know when exactly I knew that that was never going to be enough for me. But I know where I got the idea that more was possible. It wasn’t from career women or role models—when I was a girl, there really weren’t any.

I learned it from books, and none more than from the stories about Betsy, Tacy, and Tib. Because the most important thing about Betsy Ray is that she has a profound sense of confidence and her own worth.

Of course, if this had been wrapped in a sanctimonious, plaster saint package, Betsy would have been—perish the thought—Elsie Dinsmore, the perfect, boring little girl of popular fiction who Betsy herself once mocks. And, if there had been no boys in the books, I, for one, wouldn’t have read them.

But we did read them, many of us, for so many reasons: because Maud Hart Lovelace had a real gift for adapting the prose to the appropriate age level, and the themes, too; because we fell in love, not only with Betsy but with Tacy and Tib and all the others, and wanted to know from year to year what was happening to them; because of Magic Wavers and Sunday night sandwiches and smoky coffee brewed out of doors and all the other little ordinary things that, in some fashion, became our ordinary things.

And because they were just like us.

But we know there are many us’s, with many different goals and aspirations. For many years those goals and aspirations were truncated by one simple fact: our sex. Everything around us reflected that, from who sat on the Supreme Court, to who listened to our chests when we were sick, to who oversaw services when we went to church on Sunday.

But from time to time we encountered a teacher, or a parent, or even a book that told us that we should let our ambitions fly, that we should believe in ourselves, that the only limits we should put on what we tried for were the limits of our desires and our talents. When I told people I was going to give this speech, most had never heard of Betsy-Tacy, and I had to describe them as a series of books for girls. But they were so much more than that to one little girl who grew up to be a woman writer and who, perhaps, learned that she could by the example given inside these books.

—ANNA QUINDLEN

(Adapted from a speech given to the Twin

Cities Chapter of the Betsy-Tacy Society

on June 12, 1993)

Betsy and the Great World

For

ELIZABETH LESLIE

Contents

1. Traveling Alone

2. Haply I May Remember

3. And Haply May Forget

4. Enchanted Island

5. The Deluge

6. The Captain’s Ball

7. The Diner d’Adieu

8. Travel Is Broadening

9. Miss Surprise’s Surprise

10. Betsy Makes a Friend

11. Betsy Takes a Bath

12. Three’s Not a Crowd

13. Dark Fairy Tale

14. A Very Special Doll

15. A Short Stay in Heaven

16. Betsy Curls Her Hair

17. Forgetting Again

18. The Second Moon in Venice

19. Betsy Writes a Letter

20. The Roll of Drums

21. The Agony Column

1

Traveling Alone

"Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,

He travels the fastest who travels alone."

BETSY WAS CHANTING IT under her breath to give herself courage as, laden with camera, handbag, umbrella, and Complete Pocket Guide to Europe, she started up the gangplank to the deck of the S.S. Columbic.

Behind her was a barnlike structure, crowded with carriages, automobiles, baggage carts, and milling distracted passengers. Before her loomed the great bulk of the liner. Thirteen thousand tons of it, according to the advertisements over which she had pored—far, far back in Minnesota. It had layers of decks, a smokestack in the center, and tall masts flying flags. She could smell the waters of Boston Harbor—cold, salty, fishy—into which she would presently be sailing.

‘Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne…’ Her teeth were almost chattering. Not from cold, for she wore furs over her long tight coat and carried a muff. Fur trimmed, too, was her hat. She shivered because she was shaky inside, fearful and bewildered.

‘He travels the fastest who travels alone…’ She wasn’t alone, exactly. A porter had seized her suit cases, and he strode beside her shoulder. But he was a stranger, like the throngs of people all around her. And they all seemed to be in groups—sociable, laughing, chattering groups.

Of course, Betsy, too, would be with someone else shortly. Her father and mother had seen to that. A bachelor professor and his unmarried sister, friends of Betsy’s father’s brother, had agreed to keep an eye on her during the voyage. But at her first meeting with them, this morning at the Parker House, she had managed to convey the impression that their chaperonage was extremely nominal. And when they had suggested that she join them for some travel later, she had been purposefully vague. It wasn’t her idea to go through Europe with the Wilsons, kind as they were, and homesick as she already was.

Tacy ought to be here, she thought forlornly.

She and Tacy had planned trips through all the long years of their friendship. They had planned to go around the world together, to see the Taj Mahal by moonlight, to go to the top of the Himalayas and up the Amazon, and above all to live in Paris…with ladies’ maids.

Celeste and Hortense, they had christened their maids…imaginary ones, of course.

Thank goodness I have Celeste, at least, Betsy muttered. For Tacy had faithlessly married. Julia was married too. Betsy had been her older sister’s maid of honor in December.

It was January now, 1914.

Julia settling down! Betsy scoffed.

Julia wasn’t, of course, settling down. A singer, she had married a flutist, and they planned to pursue their careers together. But Betsy was in no mood to be fair. The confusion on deck was more subtly terrifying even than the tumult below. The well-dressed men, the women with corsage bouquets blooming on their shoulders, seemed so assured, so gaily sufficient to themselves and one another, so completely indifferent to the great adventure of one Betsy Ray, aged twenty-one, from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The porter turned her over to a uniformed steward. She was taken below decks, along labyrinthine corridors, carpeted, smelling of the sea, to her stateroom, Number 52.

Number 52! They had selected it back in Minneapolis. She remembered the chart on the travel agent’s desk and her family rejoicing because this stateroom had a porthole giving on the ocean.

There it was, the porthole! And the room was a small white affair with a washstand and two bunks, one above the other. Miss Wilson would have the lower one. Betsy’s steamer trunk had already been placed in a corner. The steward put her bags on it, and she tipped him, trying to act casual.

Back on deck, she secured a steamer chair—Julia had told her that was the first thing to do. But what about her ticket? Shouldn’t she give that to someone? She found the office of the purser.

He was very busy, besieged from all sides, but when she said with anxious dignity, I’m Miss Elizabeth Ray, he turned quickly.

And it’s Miss Betsy Ray herself, he remarked surprisingly.

He spoke with an Irish inflection and he looked the Irishman, too…smooth black hair with a touch of gray at the temples, blue eyes with a light in them, a dimple in his chin.

Betsy felt her color rising. How maddening to blush before his gay assurance!

I beg your pardon? she said and remembered to sink into her debutante slouch.

This fashionable pose became her, for she was very slender. (Some girls had to wear special corsets to get the debutante slouch.) She was glad her fur boa was tossed lightly over her shoulder.

Mr. O’Farrell—that was the name above his window—continued to look at her.

Faith, and I’m inter-r-r-ested to meet you! He rolled his r’s in a fascinating way. Letters to Miss Betsy Ray take up half that mountain of mail in the library yonder.

Really? Betsy forgot her pose. Her smile was a burst of sunshine.

A small space between her teeth in front gave her a look of candor. She had a friendly merry face with brown hair pushed over her cheeks in the soft disarray affected that season, and hazel eyes that glowed now into Mr. O’Farrell’s.

Letters from home! Letters from that paradise lost, lying three long days behind her!

Oh, how wonderful! she cried.

Telegrams, too, said Mr. O’Farrell teasingly. And boxes! I believe there are even some blossoms. Are you traveling alone?

Yes…practically.

Well, I’m going to give you a special place at table so you won’t get lonely. You pick it up after we sail.

But what about my ticket?

The steward will collect it in your cabin, he said.

Betsy pushed her way eagerly through crowded corridors to the paneled library, but the mail was not yet sorted.

The flowers are though, Mum, a steward said. All the stewards sounded as English as Mr. O’Farrell did Irish. He looked over a line of green boxes and selected one for her.

Betsy opened it with joyful fingers. Bob Barhydt’s card lay on top. Inside was a corsage bouquet of pink roses and lilies of the valley.

Oh, how sweet of Bob! she cried.

She pinned on the flowers at the nearest mirror, lifted her chin, and went out on deck less afraid of the surging indifferent people.

That was really sweet of Bob, she thought again, and felt guilty because he and the University of Minnesota campus seemed suddenly so remote.

It was a bleak afternoon. The sky was overcast and the air had a damp bite. She found the Wilsons engaged with the deck steward.

Dr. Wilson was a thin erect little man with white mustaches and a pointed white beard. His complexion was as pretty as Betsy’s. That came, perhaps, from his theories on diet which he had explained to her at breakfast. He scorned coffee and meat. Carrots, lettuce, apples, and whole-grain breads were his delight.

His sister, like himself, was white-haired, slender, and erect, but she liked a slice of pound cake now and then, she had admitted to Betsy with a twinkle.

Having greeted them, Betsy went to the rail and looked down on the chaos below.

Now long lines of Italians were filing into the steerage. Some were wrapped in red blankets. They carried tin dishes and piles of canned goods. Little dark-eyed children danced along in front, or crowded close to their parents, frightened and crying. Betsy wondered why they were going back to Italy.

A gong clanged commandingly.

That means good-by, said a woman in a large noisy group at Betsy’s left. And suddenly all around her people were kissing and embracing. A line began to push down the gangplank.

Soon the windows of the building below were of faces…people crying and laughing, waving handkerchieves and blowing kisses. The passengers leaning over the rail were likewise crying and laughing, waving handkerchieves and blowing kisses. The air was full of ejaculations. "Oh, there he is! Oh, there she is!"

Don’t forget you’re married! called the man who had left the group beside her.

Betsy noticed a sobbing Italian woman, gazing at the steerage passengers who were bound for her native land. At times she would forget to cry. She would catch her breath, like a child distracted by a toy; then she would remember, and start to sob again.

Somewhere, someone was strumming a guitar. "O sole mio…" A lump swelled in Betsy’s throat.

I’d better get out of here, she thought.

Suddenly she couldn’t imagine why she had wanted to go traveling. Her thoughts reached back yearningly to her family. How could she have left them!

Her darling father who worked so hard for them all, and was always so cheerful about it! Her pretty red-haired mother who had shopped so tirelessly buying these new clothes! Margaret, now sixteen, so sweet, and beginning to have beaux. And Julia, such a wonderful big sister, even though married!

Betsy sniffed.

She could see them all, and the gray stucco cottage out in Minneapolis with snow clinging to the bare vines and lying on the evergreens around the glassed-in porch. Inside, there would be a fire in the fireplace. They always had Sunday night lunch around that fire. Her father made the sandwiches.

Tears flooded Betsy’s eyes.

Someone beside her called to someone else. Did you know we had an author on board?

An author? Betsy dashed away her tears. For a wild moment she thought they meant her, for she planned to be an author. That was one reason she was going abroad.

Yes, came the answer, shrilling above her head. Some reporters were talking to her down in the library. They’re taking pictures now, over there by the gangplank.

Betsy turned eagerly to look.

She saw a small stout woman with bright auburn hair under a purple veil and hat. Her purple coat was laden with flowers. Flashbulbs popped.

Maybe they’ll be doing that for me someday, thought Betsy.

Then the photographers shouldered their cameras and ran down the gangplank with reporters following—the last ones to leave the ship.

Betsy looked over the railing quickly. There was something familiar about one of the reporters. There was a swing to his shoulders…He had taken off his hat, and she saw that his hair was blond. Before she realized what she was doing Betsy leaned still farther and called out frantically, Joe!

But her voice was lost in the hubbub, for now the gangplanks were being pulled up and the engines began to tug and strain. Deep-throated horns were blowing. Screams and shouts of farewell rose in a frenzied babel.

Betsy’s eyes searched the windows of the building below. And sure enough a blond head appeared. She recognized the pompadour haircut. But this young man had a mustache—a close-cropped blond mustache! Nevertheless he was, he was. Joe Willard!

He was scanning the rail, frowning. He didn’t see her. At least, she didn’t think he did, and she didn’t call again. She was glad he hadn’t heard. He would never forgive her—probably he was never going to anyway—but he certainly never would if he knew she had come through Boston without letting him know.

Now he was frowning down at a paper of some kind.

The passenger list? Betsy had one in her pocket; she had seen her own name. He looked up sharply.

But the S.S. Columbic was moving. Slowly, inexorably, the horn still blowing, it edged out of the pier. A line of churned white foam appeared, and the space of cold green water widened. The barnlike building faded, and the shoreline came into view.

Betsy couldn’t see it, for her tears were back again.

It wasn’t surprising, she thought, as the steamer picked its way past a fringe of ships at anchor, and along a busy channel, it wasn’t at all surprising that Joe was at the ship. She knew he worked part-time on the Boston Transcript.

I wish I hadn’t seen him, she thought. It would be harder to forget him now, and that was another reason she was going abroad…to forget Joe Willard. She wiped her eyes with grim determination.

‘Haply I may remember and haply may forget,’ she quoted flippantly.

The woman standing next to her looked around, startled.

Then Betsy turned her back on the Hub of the Universe, which was rising along the horizon. She’d write a letter or two to go back with the pilot, she decided abruptly.

In the library she found a desk and scribbled a note to her family. She tried to sound ecstatic, and didn’t mention Joe, although she longed to share the news of his mustache. She thanked Bob Barhydt for the flowers. Returning to her stateroom, she replaced her hat with a scarf, got out her steamer rug, and went above, hoping that good-bys were over. But the pilot was just leaving, waving, followed by cheers. His boat bobbed off into gathering fog.

The Columbic now had left all traffic far behind. They were in the open ocean. Betsy leaned against the rail and the wind tore at her unkindly. Looking out at the leaden waves, the joyless, circling gulls, she felt unutterably lonely. Seeing Joe had made her hurt inside. She didn’t even want to read her mail.

The water grew rougher. Her body could feel the new movement, the climb up, the drop down. A poem she had learned one time began to toll in her head:

"Up and down! Up and down!

From the base of the wave, to the billow’s crown…"

But suddenly there was too much up and down. Walking unsteadily, she found her deck chair and the steward tucked her in. He offered her tea, but she didn’t want tea. Burrowing miserably into her rug, she watched the vessel rise and fall.

People were walking around the deck with incomprehensible zest. Presently she saw Dr. Wilson, walking briskly, smiling. He recognized her and paused.

Would you care to walk, Miss Betsy?

She shook her head. I don’t feel so good.

Seasickness, he said, can be controlled by diet. But he looked sympathetic. My sister hasn’t learned how either, and she believes in going to bed. She always goes to her bunk and stays there until she’s accustomed to the motion.

I think that’s what I’ll do, Betsy replied, struggling to her feet. He helped her to the passageway.

Miss Wilson was in bed and greeted her faintly. Betsy undressed too, although, above decks, the bugle was blowing merrily for dinner. Pinned to her innermost garments was a chamois bag containing money, some extra American Express checks, and a check signed in blank by her father—for emergencies. Betsy transferred this treasure to the bosom of her flannel nightgown. Then, without even stopping to wind her hair on curlers, she climbed to the upper bunk, pulled up the blankets, and lay flat.

She could see a patch of sea and sky through the porthole, but down here, too, it appeared and disappeared in menacing rhythm. She closed her eyes.

After a time the stewardess came in. She was a dainty little Englishwoman with an encouraging manner. She asked Miss Wilson and Betsy whether they wanted dinner. They both declined.

I’d like to see my mail though, Betsy said feebly. Her letters, telegrams, and boxes had been sent to the cabin and made a tantalizing pile, far below on her trunk.

The stewardess handed them up, and although Betsy didn’t feel able to read them, it was comforting to have them near. She found a fat letter from home. It would be a round robin—the Ray family was always writing round robins—and put it under her cheek.

An orchestra was playing now. For dinner, probably. It had said in the folder that there was music for dinner. People dressed up for it and it had sounded such fun.

"It’s a long way to Tipperary,

It’s a long way to go…"

Betsy had danced to that tune and she had always liked it, but it sounded dreary now. Tears dripped into the round robin.

She wasn’t sick, exactly…not like Miss Wilson was. Miss Wilson occasionally jumped out of bed and was very sick indeed. But Betsy felt frightened and lonesome and forlorn.

She wondered just what she was doing here. Why should she be in the bowels of a ship ploughing through sullen, turbulent waters, going to a foreign continent alone? Why? Why?

She turned her thoughts backward and tried to pull all the reasons together.

2

Haply I May Remember

SHE HADN’T, BETSY CONFIDED to her pillow, done what she wanted to in college.

She had gotten off to a bad start because her freshman year was interrupted by appendicitis, and afterward she had gone to California for a long convalescence in her grandmother’s home. She had loved California. It seemed unbelievable to find rioting flowers and oranges on shiny green trees and warm fragrant air in the middle of winter. She had loved the peace of her grandmother’s home. An actor uncle who grew grapes near San Diego had given her a typewriter, and she had sold her first story.

I found myself out there, Betsy had declared more than once.

Yes, but back at the University she had lost herself again. Was life always like that? she wondered. A game of hide and seek in which you only occasionally found the person you wanted to be?

It had been discouraging, next fall, to be a year behind her old high school class. Everyone else was a sophomore while she was still a freshman. And it had seemed unjust to find Advanced Botany and Higher Algebra still lying in wait. Betsy loved English and French but she had always hated mathematics and science. Feeling herself almost a professional writer now (because she sometimes sold a story for ten or twelve dollars), she resented these unpleasant subjects even more.

Plunging zealously into activities, she became Woman’s Editor of the college paper. (A tall well-dressed young man named Bob Barhydt was also on the staff.) She wrote stories which were accepted by the college magazine. One was better than the others. It was really good and Betsy didn’t quite know why, for it was just a simple story laid in her Uncle Keith’s vineyard. But the famous professor, Dr. Maria Sanford, had praised it. She had written Betsy a letter about it. This success made science and mathematics all the more arduous, and Betsy’s grades had slipped.

Joe Willard, on the other hand, to whom she was almost—but not quite—engaged, had done very well at the U, although he was a part-time copy reader on the Minneapolis Tribune. Because of his outstanding work he was offered a scholarship to Harvard and went east at the beginning of his junior year.

Betsy was happy for him, and very proud, and he planned to come back the following summer, which made parting easier. Yet his going had hurt her, too. After he left she gave up all scholastic strivings. Her friends were juniors; she was only a humble sophomore.

I’ll be a success socially, at least, she decided flippantly and joined a sorority although she had never liked them.

It wasn’t a good thing to do. She soon grew tired of pretending that her deepest interests were social. She made a few close friends in the group, but not many, and the exclusive Greek letter club separated her from congenial girls on the Daily and the Mag.

But after she became a sorority girl Bob Barhydt started to rush her. He was very much the fraternity man. (Joe had never joined a fraternity. He had no time or money or inclination for them.) Because of Bob, Betsy’s sophomore year went in a gay whirl of parties.

She wasn’t happy, though, in spite of her social success, her achievements on the Daily and the Mag, and her name on committees and the membership lists of many organizations. Betsy felt that she had failed herself. She hadn’t meant to be sucked into the social current. She hadn’t meant to flirt with Bob, or to settle down to any one man while Joe was away. She had meant to get an education. And she wasn’t doing it.

It wasn’t, she knew, the fault of the University. People all around her were getting excellent educations there. It wasn’t even the fault of the sorority. Many of the outstanding girls on the campus belonged to these groups.

Betsy admitted to the night and the deep Atlantic that the fault had lain strictly with herself.

As spring came on she became more and more frivolous. The gossip column in the Daily was full of jokes about her and Bob. (A corner of the Oak Tree, the campus ice cream parlor, was called the B and B.) The Year Book showed kodak pictures of them river-banking—the University phrase for strolling along the Mississippi.

Joe subscribed to the Minnesota Daily and he bought a copy of the Year Book. Suddenly his letters became as cold as ice.

Betsy was looking forward longingly to his promised visit. Her dissatisfaction with herself, her wasted year, the flirtation with Bob, couldn’t be explained in letters. If she and Joe could talk, she could make him understand. But he didn’t come back. He wrote that he had a good summer job on the Boston Transcript. He mentioned his roommate’s pretty sister. Their letters grew farther and farther apart.

I believe I like Bob better anyway, Betsy told Tacy, who knew that wasn’t true. For something in Betsy had always reached out to Joe Willard—blond and stalwart with a proud swing in his shoulders, a deep contagious laugh, and a look of clear goodness in his eyes.

He was an orphan. He had earned his own way since his early teens, gallantly ignoring shabby clothes and lack of money. He had been her ideal since her freshman year in high school. And Betsy was tenacious in her affections.

Tacy, too, was tenacious in her affections, and when she completed her course in public school music that June, she had married Harry Kerr.

He was an aggressive young salesman whom she had met at the Rays’ four years before. They had planned a festive wedding with her sister Katie as maid of honor and Betsy and Tib as bridesmaids. But early that spring Tacy’s father died. Everyone agreed Tacy’s marriage should not be postponed, but it was celebrated quietly with only Katie and Harry’s brother present.

Before starting off for Niagara Falls on their honeymoon, Tacy and her husband had come for a few days to the Ray house. The Rays moved out for them. Mr. Ray took Mrs. Ray on a business trip. Betsy and Margaret moved over to Betsy’s sorority house.

They couldn’t have helped Tacy more. The Ray house for many years had been a second home to her; and in Minneapolis as in Deep Valley it was always the same—a fire in the grate in winter, flowers in summer, the smell of good cooking in Anna’s cheerful kitchen, and above all an atmosphere of happiness, of harmony, of love.

That atmosphere and her husband’s tenderness helped to assuage Tacy’s grief. It was a help, too, after she and Harry moved into their Minneapolis apartment, to have Betsy near. And Tacy’s need of her helped Betsy.

That summer, Betsy made her bedroom into an office. She was still going on dates with Bob. They went dancing on the Radisson Roof, and canoeing on the Minneapolis lakes. They went to band concerts and the movies, and he came to Sunday night supper. But Betsy’s really happy hours were spent at her desk.

She worked faithfully every morning on short stories and at last settled down to one she liked, trying to make it as good as the one Dr. Sanford had praised. Meanwhile, as she had done since she was in high school, she kept all her old stories on the go. Neatly typed, with return postage enclosed, they went from magazine to magazine.

Betsy had long ago worked out a system. When she finished a story she made a list of magazines to which she thought it might sell. As soon as it came back from one it was sent to the next. Many of her manuscripts had made twenty and thirty trips, and the record of their journeyings was kept in a small notebook which was now in Margaret’s keeping. She had promised to send out the stories while Betsy was abroad.

September brought the beginning of the senior year for Joe. Betsy would be a disconsolate junior. More than once the pages of her story…underlined, crossed out, written in the margins…were damp with tears shed, not at the woes of her heroine, but at the prospect of beginning so miserable a year.

At last, in a desperate moment, she went to her father. She broached the idea that perhaps—for a girl who wished to be a writer—two years of college were enough.

He listened thoughtfully,